Canonical's deliberately obfuscated IP policy
I bumped into Mark Shuttleworth today at Linuxcon and we had a brief conversation about Canonical's IP policy. The short summary:
- Canonical assert that the act of compilation creates copyright over the binaries, and you may not redistribute those binaries unless (a) the license prevents Canonical from restricting redistribution (eg, the GPL), or (b) you follow the terms of their IP policy. This means that, no matter what Dustin's blogpost says, Canonical's position is that you must ask for permission before distributing any custom container images that contain Ubuntu binaries, even if you use no Ubuntu trademarks in the process. Doing so without their permission is an infringement of their copyright.
- Canonical have no intention of clarifying their policy, because Canonical benefit from companies being legally uncertain as to whether they have permission to do something or not.
- Mark justifies maintaining this uncertainty by drawing an analogy between it and the perceived uncertainties that exist around certain aspects of the GPL. I disagree with this analogy pretty strongly. One of the main reasons for the creation of GPLv3 was to deal with some more ambiguous aspects of GPLv2 (such as what actually happened after license termination and how patents interacted with the GPL). The FSF publish a large FAQ intended to provide further clarity. The major ambiguity is in what a derivative work actually is, which is something the FSF can't answer absolutely (that's going to be up to courts) but will give its opinion on when asked. The uncertainties in Canonical's IP policy aren't a result of a lack of legal clarity - they're a result of Canonical's refusal to answer questions.
The even shorter summary: Canonical won't clarify their IP policy because they believe they can make more money if they don't.
Why do I keep talking about this? Because Canonical are deliberately making it difficult to create derivative works, and that's one of the core tenets of the definition of free software. Their IP policy is fundamentally incompatible with our community norms, and that's something we should care about rather than ignoring.